Creating smooth normals on connected parts

MMintPaw · 2025-01-02T21:32:19+00:00

I've looked around at a lot of the other posts related to normal map workflow, but there's one thing I can't figure out.

When you have multiple images that get combined, how do you create normals that are continuous?

I'm creating normals by making a duplicate images/ folder as seems recommended.

Here's an image of what I'm talking about:

This is supposed to be a character's leg attached to their body, only showing the lighting generated by the normals.
There's seams between the leg and the body. The color channels smoothly connect without seams, but the auto generated normals don't.

I'm using Sprite Illuminator to generate the normals, is there a tool that deals with this issue? Right now I don't see a way of fixing this without hand painting normals in Photoshop.

Spinebot · 2025-01-02T21:33:06+00:00

To create continuous normals across multiple images that are combined, you need to ensure that the normal maps are generated in a way that accounts for the connected nature of the parts. Unfortunately, tools like Sprite Illuminator may not automatically handle this seamlessly for connected parts. One approach is to manually adjust the normals in an image editing software like Photoshop to ensure continuity across seams. Alternatively, you could explore using a custom shader that can blend normals at the seams, but this would require shader programming knowledge. Another option is to use a tool that allows for more control over the normal map generation process, potentially allowing you to specify how normals should blend across connected parts.